Friday, June 5, 2009

Britain's Best Fund Manager: "No Green Shoots"

From This is Money:

Investment guru Neil Woodford believes the market is getting ahead of itself: that there is too much misplaced confidence and that a real recovery is far from being on the horizon.

His statement comes hot on the heels of an assertion from Anthony Bolton, the UK's most famous investor and former manager of the Fidelity Special Situations fund, that all the pieces are in place for the start of a true bull market.

Woodford says: 'The start of a period of sustained expansion in the economy is a hell of a long way away. I believe three or four years away.'

In the past five years alone, the FSTE All-Share index has posted meager growth of just over 1%, while his portfolios have achieved returns of 49% and 51% respectively.

He has a very strong track record when it comes to making the right calls - a decade ago he shunned technology stocks while others en masse gobbled them up right before the sector imploded.

Back then he saw upside opportunity in stocks that the market hated because they were 'old economy' stocks.

Rolling on 10 years, he finds opportunity exists in the very businesses that the market has, for the last three months, really taken against, with notable picks coming from the pharmaceutical, tobacco, and utilities sectors....MORE